Challenge of the Unthinkable; John Adams Delivers a Commissioned Work on 9/11

By JOHN ROCKWELL

Published: September 17, 2002

Ever since Sept. 11 of last year, artists have wondered how to address a tragedy of such magnitude. The dangers of exploiting or aestheticizing grief seem painfully self-evident. Yet art must respond, and it has begun to do so.

It is no accident that when the New York Philharmonic chose a composer to create a score memorializing 9/11 -- and to help open its season this week and inaugurate the reign of Lorin Maazel as music director -- it should settle on John Adams.

Now 55, Mr. Adams has long since transcended the pigeonhole of Minimalism and become possibly the most successful and widely respected American composer of his generation. His operas ''Nixon in China'' and ''The Death of Klinghoffer,'' his many orchestral works and prestigious commissions and a 10-CD retrospective album on Nonesuch Records all attest to that success.

Mr. Adams has said that he accepted the commission almost from a sense of obligation and that he needed to do it. ''It was my way of coming to terms with my complex feelings about 9/11,'' he said during a telephone interview recently from his home in Berkeley, Calif.

''But that sounds a little selfish,'' he continued, ''to say you did it to benefit yourself.''

Instead, he explained, he had faith in the power of art to transcend the moment. ''The first time you see a photograph of a fireman crying, you are shocked. But if you see the same picture over and over and then as an advertisement for a politician, it's beginning to be corrupted. What I am trying to do is go back to the original emotions and create something out of time, the way great art ought to.''

Mr. Adams's operas suggest an affinity for the political, topical and moral issues of the day. It is an affinity that has gotten him and his collaborators (the director Peter Sellars and the poet Alice Goodman) into trouble, but that he stoutly defends as the prerogative of art forms like film and the novel, so why not opera? But he has also shown a gift for elegiac contemplation in the manner of Whitman and Ives.

The new score, which will last nearly 26 minutes, is called ''On the Transmigration of Souls.'' It will receive its first performance on Thursday at Avery Fisher Hall, coupled with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; the program will be repeated on Friday, Saturday and Sept. 24. For the opening-night gala tomorrow, however, Mr. Adams's piece will be replaced by Beethoven's ''Leonore'' Overture No. 3. The Philharmonic apparently felt that the Adams-Beethoven coupling might be unsettling to festive donors. Mr. Adams had no comment on that decision.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Adams was in London conducting the soundtrack for a forthcoming film version of ''The Death of Klinghoffer,'' his opera about the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinians in 1985 and the murder of the wheelchair-bound passenger Leon Klinghoffer. He was working on the scene in which Marilyn Klinghoffer is told that her husband has been killed. The opera, first performed in 1991, was attacked as anti-Semitic and remains controversial: the Boston Symphony canceled performances of choruses from it shortly after Sept. 11 of last year.

Two aspects of the opera were particularly criticized. One was a scene in which a New Jersey family is satirized, sitcom-style. The opera's critics called it an insult to American Jews. The opera's creators hotly denied that charge, but the scene was subsequently cut and does not appear on the recording. The other, broader area of concern was what critics saw as the evenhandedness in the treatment of the terrorists and the victims.

Mr. Adams resists the notion that this new work is any kind of answer to his ''Klinghoffer'' critics. ''I didn't think of it in that way, and I don't think the New York Philharmonic thought of it in that way,'' he said.

His piece is scored for a large orchestra (with a quarter-tone-tuned piano and violin ensemble), an adult chorus, a children's chorus and prerecorded sound. There is also an interactive electronic penumbra, as it were, surrounding the audience and reinforcing and echoing certain aspects of the live sound.

The spare text was assembled by the composer from messages about lost loved ones posted near ground zero, quotations from family members in the Portraits of Grief series in The New York Times, a recitation of randomly selected names of victims and one cell phone call from one of the hijacked airplanes (''I see water and buildings . . .'').

Despite a couple of slow-moving climaxes, the overall effect is calm and consoling. Mr. Adams has made no attempt to illustrate the tragedy in sound. Instead, he has written of creating a ''meditative space'' or a ''memory space,'' akin to a medieval cathedral, in which one can sense countless generations of souls.

The prerecorded sound files include street noises and a siren, but everything is distant, muffled. A recurrent motif, subtle but pervasive, is Ives's haunting ''Unanswered Question'': an offstage trumpet solo recalls the one in that piece without actually quoting it, and the sustained string chords echo Ives as well. The final climax has the children repeating the words ''I love you to the moon and back,'' and the adults repeating: ''Light. Light. Light. Day. Light. Sky . . .''